Apple CEO Tim Cook takes the stage at iPhone announcement

The Apple-decorted Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Sept. 11, 2012.
(Karl Mondon)

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook got acolytes and analysts fired up at a sprawling San Francisco conference hall Wednesday morning, kicking off the unveiling of the newest iteration of the Cupertino company's wildly popular iPhone by telling the large crowd "We've got some amazing things to show you."

Cook is expected to introduce the first all-new iPhone released since the company's co-founder and longtime CEO, Steve Jobs, died last year. The new device is expected to be thinner than its predecessors with a bigger screen, and connect to high-speed 4G, or LTE, networks.

Cook -- in his Jobs-like attire of black shirt, jeans and tennis shoes -- began his address by noting Apple's success in the "post-PC era," telling attendees that Apple has sold more iPads, the company's tablet offering, than any tech company has sold PCs. The CEO told the excited crowd at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that Apple had sold 400 million devices running the Cupertino company's mobile operating system, iOS, which Cook called "amazing."

Before the event, 9to5Mac and other blogs were able to find links prepared for news releases on Apple's website Wednesday morning that announced the phone would be called the iPhone 5 and have LTE connectivity; other links pointed to a new version of iTunes and new iPod Touch and Nano devices.

Advertisement

Apple took down its online store Wednesday morning, which the company commonly does ahead of announcements of new products.

Since Cook unveiled the third-generation iPad, his first major product release, at the same spot in March, Apple's star has only continued to expand to supernova status. A San Jose jury last month ruled that Samsung had violated Apple's patents for the iPhone and iPad, a potentially industry-changing verdict that analysts say could help the Cupertino tech giant regain dominance in the smartphone market from Google's (GOOG) Android operating system.

After winning the court battle, Apple's market value set a world record of $624 billion, but didn't stop there: Monday, the stock set an all-time high of more than $683 per share. Since hitting its record price, the share price has fallen, closing Tuesday at $660.59 and staying relatively steady up to the beginning of Wednesday's announcement, when shares were trading for $662.23.

The iPhone 4S was Cook's first product launch as Apple's full-time CEO. The device was greeted with disappointment by many who expected a fifth-generation iPhone rather than simply an improved version of the existing product.

Critics at the time also noted Cook's subdued manner at the launch -- a mood that perhaps became more understandable the following day, when Jobs died of pancreatic cancer just six weeks after handing the company's reins to Cook, formerly his chief operating officer.

Despite those carping critics, the iPhone 4S generated blockbuster sales and record pre-orders, perhaps fueled in part by a worldwide outpouring of emotion in the wake of Jobs' death.

The iPhone 5, by contrast, will rise or fall solely on its merits, and ISI analyst Brian Marshall has projected Apple could sell as many as 50 million of them in the December quarter alone if its supply chain can keep up.

Stephen Baker, a telecom industry analyst with NPD Group in New York, offered a minority dissent, warning that a blowout debut isn't necessarily guaranteed for the iPhone 5. He noted that the U.S. smartphone market "appears to be an increasingly mature one" and that Apple and Android dominate it so completely there are few weaker competitors from whom Apple might steal market share.

Too, Baker pointed out, it's been less than a year since the iPhone 4S was launched. In the most recent quarter for which it reported earnings, in late July, Apple said it had sold about 35 million units of that phone.

Such numbers are a stark contrast to the 1 million units Apple sold of its first iPhone in the first 10 weeks after it its June 2007 release. It's a bit hard to believe that was only five years ago, considering how fundamentally the device has reshaped the world of computing.

Apple has unveiled a new iPhone once a year, selling a reported 244 million in all -- 40 percent of those during this fiscal year alone. Android, which Google released as an open-source platform 10 months after Jobs announced the iPhone, operates some 480 million devices worldwide, according to the Mountain View titan's own estimates.

Entrenched players such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have been reeling since, as first consumers, then corporate clients began ditching their desktop and laptop computers for the increased mobility and convenience of smartphones and tablets.

Cook has repeatedly said that Apple, like the rest of the industry, is charging ahead into the post-PC era. Considering that Jobs helped create the PC industry with Apple's 1976 founding, it's easy to imagine him smiling somewhere, surveying all that disruption in such a short span of time.

Contact Peter Delevett at 408-271-3638. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercwiretap.

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.